A motor vehicle, which is a moving body, has various kinds of electronic instruments mounted thereon. Thus, the vehicle is arranged with wiring harnesses for supplying an electrical power from an electrical source and for supplying control signals to such electronic instruments from a computer. The wiring harness has a plurality of electrical cables and connectors attached to terminals of the electrical cables.
The cable consists of electrical conductive core wires and an insulating sheath covering the wires. That is, the cable is a sheathed wire. The connector generally has a terminal piece and an insulating connector housing. The terminal piece is fitted to an end of the cable to electrically connect with the core wires. The connector housing has a box-like configuration for receiving the terminal piece.
The electrical cables of the wiring harness are selected as corresponding to the application, the size of the wire core, the material of the sheath, etc, the sheath material being determined to meet with, for example, a heat resistance performance. The application includes systems mounted on the vehicle like an air bag and an ABS (Antilock Brake System) which use electrical cables for transmitting control signals such as a vehicle speed and for supplying an electrical power.
Such electrical cables are colored or marked differently from each other to indicate the application of each cable. In a conventional wiring harness fabricating method, electrical cables are provided with colors or marks during an assembling step of wire cores that are made of an electrically conductive material such as copper.
The electrical cables provided with such colors are cut each in a desired length, and terminal pieces are fitted to ends of the cables. If required, the electrical cables are connected to each other. Then, the terminal pieces are received each in a connector housing to obtain a wiring harness.
Some electrical cables used for a particular application such as a ground circuit, a power circuit, and an air bag system of a particular car model have an outer surface provided with a color which is not selected frequently for wiring harnesses. This enables an easy recognition of the electrical cables for the particular application and eliminates a combination error of the cables to achieve a better available percentage of the cables used in the wiring harnesses.
However, after the production of the particular car model has come to an end, electrical cables having the rarely used color are used little or none of them are used.
Thus, the unused electrical cables having the rare color have to be stocked for a long time in a wiring harness assembling factory, increasing an inventory space thereof. Furthermore, the unused electrical cables have been thrown out after a predetermined stock period. This is not undesirable for saving natural resources.
In view of the foregoing situation, an object of the invention is an electrical cable reuse method which reduces a long time stock of cables.